Tuesday, October 25, 2011

iOS 5 Storyboard + UITableView Tutorial II (Improved)

Since I'm learning as well and have been reading other people's tutorials that I thought were not very good (because they either had too much clutter or did not stress the important points) I thought I would make another tutorial on the key ideas of UITableViews that I missed out on before.

2. In the MainStoryboard file look at the attribute inspector and you will see the checkbox for Is Initial View Controller.

Common Error: Not having set an initial view controller. The simulator will popup and then just be in a deadlock and in the output log, it will say something about how your application doesn't not have a root view controller.

3. Embed a navigation controller in the first view by going to Editor > Embed In > Navigation Controller.

Note: If you delete the connection, and then control+drag from the Tab Bar Controller you will see the following in the image below. You can set the initial scene to be the first view controller by control + dragging as described before and then selecting Relationship - viewControllers. This creates a connection between the Tab Bar Controller and and Navigation Controller.

4. Suppose I create a tableview by drag and dropping it a UITableViewController, I can customize the cells in the right panel.

Key Points:

Style: Change Style of UITableViewCell
Identifier: Cell Identifier to Distinguish Prototype Cells
Accessory: The Creates The Right Facing Arrow
Size: Resize the cell by dragging it up or down.

Note: Ignore the left half of the screenshot since I made an error the first time.

5. Create a new UITableViewController called AlbumViewController and select the table view controller and change its class to AlbumViewController .

6. Suppose I created a datasource in the AppDelegate.m file and I follow the usual steps to populate the tableview. The one interesting change is here: tableview cells are now automatically allocated so the code is much simpler than before. In the AlbumViewController.m file implement the usual methods.

(Note: Copy and paste them from the source file in the download.)

7. Change this method and you can then slide to delete a tableview cell.

Hi Kurry, thank you for this! I found is very helpful. I compiled a list of some top resources I found around this topic, and included your post. http://www.verious.com/board/Giancarlo-Leonio/creating-custom-table-view-cells-with-xcode-storyboard/